DEP boss should review climate-change studies

Last week, a day after highlights of two major studies on global warming were made public, one of Pennsylvania’s environmental champions, Rep. Greg Vitali, D-166, released some startling news.

Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Michael Krancer reportedly said he does not acknowledge the validity of climate change when questioned by Vitali and three other legislators during a House Appropriations Committee hearing about his agency’s 2013-2014 proposed budget.

“Climate change is the most important issue facing this planet and it is shocking that the state’s chief environmental official does not have a position on this issue,” maintained Vitali, the Democratic chairman of the House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee.

Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides and fluorinated gases are all greenhouse gases that are responsible for trapping heat in our atmosphere and contributing to climate change. The well-documented deleterious results to the planet and its inhabitants range from rising sea levels to a rising incidence of skin cancer. A major way human beings create greenhouse gas is by burning fossil fuels to create energy. The average household produced 12.4 tons of carbon dioxide from its routine operations and about 11.7 tons from driving motor vehicles in 2003, according to the Energy Information Administration.

A Montgomery County Republican, Krancer was appointed Pennsylvania’s environmental protection secretary by Gov. Tom Corbett in January 2011. An economist and lawyer by education, Krancer manages an agency with a mission to protect Pennsylvania’s air, land and water from pollution and restore natural resources.

His exposure to environmental issues began in 1999 when Republican Gov. Tom Ridge nominated him to serve on Pennsylvania’s Environmental Hearing Board, a statewide trial and appellate court for environmental cases. In 2003, Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell named Krancer chief judge and chairman of the environmental hearing board.

Krancer certainly should be acquainted with sources of greenhouse gases, having served from June 2008 through October 2009, as assistant general counsel for Exelon Corp., an energy company that distributes electricity and natural gas. Exelon is also the United States’ largest operator of nuclear power which is not a source of greenhouse gases, but is a source of potentially hazardous radiation.

Recent studies by leading university and federal climate scientists say man-made global warming is responsible for both decreasing snowfalls and creating giant blizzards. It is a matter of understanding atmospheric physics that says a warmer atmosphere can hold and dump more moisture.

Twice as many extreme snowstorms have walloped the United States in the last 50 years than in the previous 60 years, consistent with an upward trend in extreme rain and snow in the northeastern United States charted by the National Climactic Data Center.

However, the spring snow cover in the northern hemisphere has shrunk on average by 1 million square miles in the last 45 years, according to researchers at the Global Snow Lab at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

“Shorter snow season, less snow overall, but the occasional knockout punch, that’s the new world we live in, “ said Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton University climate scientist.

If Pennsylvania’s top environmental official isn’t convinced by an ardent environmentalist that our climate is changing, perhaps the word of scientists will change his mind. He should make it his business to look into it.